


I Miss You

by Fangirllikewhoa



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode Related, F/F, cophine - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-02 20:00:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4072660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fangirllikewhoa/pseuds/Fangirllikewhoa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cosima and Delphine reflect on the events that have brought them to this point and find a way to communicate. </p><p>Canon compliant through 3x06</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Miss You

“I miss you.”

Cosima’s heart squeezed in her chest, and she bit her lip, biting back the cascade of words that had come bubbling to the surface.  Words she had tried to bury, with weed, with wine… with Shay.  She swallowed hard against them, turned on her heel and walked out.

Delphine slid down into her chair and pulled out a decanter to pour a finger of Lagavulin, a few fingers if she was honest with herself.  Being honest with herself was low on her list of things to do these days.  Taking stock of what she’d had to do, what she still had yet to do to fulfill her promise to Cosima, to love the sisters, all of them, and keep them safe, was an ugly task.  She felt ugly for it-torn from her humanity, from the things that grounded her, from the blood and bone of science that had been her foundation, and now from the one person who had seen her for herself, all of herself.

Perhaps it was for the best- the person reflected back at her in the crystal decanter was not the person that Cosima loved, of that she was sure.  How could she begin to explain the danger that they’d barely escaped with Topside? How could she rationalize the torture that she’d put Rachel through, and that she’d do it again, willingly, to keep Cosima safe?  And now, because as any good scientist knows, for every action there is an equal reaction, it was her turn to be tortured-  by the monitor’s reports of her Cosima and this woman, their time together, their text messages, the long looks and nights spent away from the loft.  Shay was all softness where Delphine had turned into hard edges to protect herself. Softness got you killed in this business, there was no doubt about that.  

Delphine wouldn’t be the first monitor to fall in love with her subject.  In fact, she’d begun to believe that that was the way that Dyad had always intended it.  They counted on the threat of danger to the clones to control them, to make their monitors do things contrary to their ethics, to their judgement.  Indeed, fear was a powerful motivator, as she was beginning to understand now from both sides of the equation.

Cosima slid the heavy barn door of the loft closed, and popped the screwdriver home.  For the thousandth time she thought to herself that they might want to invest in better security.  With the advances in Bluetooth technology, they could probably have closed circuit cameras routed to the clonephones, not to mention an alarm system.  And yet, she never brought it up to Felix or Sarah, perhaps believing somewhere deep down that if they all just acted as though everything was ok, as though there wasn’t a very real threat of people trying to murder them, people who wanted their very essence, their tiny strands of clone DNA all woven together in a beautiful tangled mess, well, maybe if they all kept their heads buried in the sand and a screwdriver between themselves and their bat-shit brothers, maybe then everything would be ok.  

She went over to the counter to grab a special brownie and some milk.  Even though she hadn’t been coughing up her life’s blood, she still thought it was probably best to stop smoking, and it kept Scott from worrying. She lay back on the couch with a plate on her chest and her laptop propped on her belly and knees.  As she munched her afternoon fix, she clicked through to Scott’s latest report on their research.  Neither of them were experts at ciphers, but lucky for them they had a host of equally nerdy friends at their disposal.  One of Scott’s old Magic:The Gathering buddies from college was in a PhD program studying encryption.  He was willing to help with the Dr. Moreau cipher, but Cosima wasn’t sure how to provide him enough of a sample while still keeping their secrets safe. As her mind turned the problem over and over, she mindlessly clicked through to her cloud storage to see some of the scanned pages.  Instead, she was greeted by a quicktime video.

Without thinking she clicked over it and she was flooded with memories.  This particular video was taken just months ago, but it felt like lifetimes. There she was with Delphine- high as a kite on nitrous and giggling about polonium. Delphine had been trying to recite the periodic table in an effort to prove to Cosima that she was not feeling the effects of the gas. And yet they’d fallen into a giggling heap, and finally to the couch where they’d professed their love to one another.  Cosima sighed.  Where had this Delphine gone?  Since Frankfurt she was all angles and lines, no more softness – except in her voice.  Her voice that had just plaintively, hesitantly, admitted to missing her.

Cosima missed her too of course, hence the pot, hence the wine, hence Shay. Shay who was all soft curves, soft voice, hell, even soft science.  What an easy distraction she was from everything else.  Every other thing in her life was tainted now with Dyad.  Everything- even sweet Scott- now was witness to the fucked up science experiment that was her life.  Was it so wrong to just want something pure, something that was hers alone?  And yet there was something niggling in the back of her head about how quick it was, how easy.  Jesus, maybe the pot was making her paranoid, but the last time someone walked into her life and seemed too good to be true, she was.

Feeling the effects of the brownie now, she dug through her bag until she could find her phone.  She hesitated briefly, but texted anyhow.

_I know, and me too, but what are we supposed to do about it?  It’s all too much._

She grabbed her things to go grab the bus to Shay’s house, intent on burying all of it a little deeper.  She hesitated when she heard her phone trill.

_Please, just wait._

Leaning on the brick wall in the alley, she stared at her phone, unsure of how to reply.  Wait?  For what?  She’d been waiting for weeks while Delphine had been whisked away to Frankfurt- with not a word, and then to find out she was back- though Sarah.  No, she was done waiting, and frankly given her latest test results she didn’t know how much time she had left to wait anyhow.

She stepped out from the alley, still intent on her phone and her reply when she tripped over a loose brick.  Before she could tumble to the ground she was held up by an arm around her waist.  As she righted herself she instantly recognized the form that was holding her up, the smell of the perfume, and the sound of the voice in her ear.

“Careful _mon amour_.”  
Cosima’s eyes flashed, as she looked up at the woman holding her.  Had she always been so tall?

“You don’t get to call me that anymore.”

The hands encircling her waist released her and she stepped back.

“What are you doing here?  Why are you texting me?  Did you just remember we could do that?  That we could actually communicate?”

Delphine sighed and gestured to a Land Rover parked at the curb.  “Please Cosima, get in so we can talk.  I hate texting because I want to hear the words come out of your mouth.  Just give me five minutes, and you can yell at me the whole time if you feel you must.”

“You’re damn right I must!  Wait?!  Wait?!  What the fuck is that?”

Delphine herded Cosima into the driver’s side of the car and shut the door and walked to the other side.  Cosima was still yelling- all arms and expletives- and Delphine turned to her as she continued to rant.

“Cosima.  Please.  The things I have done for you.  For your sisters.  You have no idea.  Topside… they, they’re everywhere.  I don’t know whose side anyone is on anymore.  I’ve lost my bearings.”  She slumped in the seat, and whispered, “I have one guiding principle.  To love you all, to protect you all.  But I’m stuck Cosima.  I’m just…”

Cosima had grown quiet.  “Give me the keys.”

“ _Quoi_?”  

“The keys. Come on, we’re going to get out of here.”

Delphine handed Cosima the keys.  “You should probably know that it is stolen. I took it from the garage at Dyad.  They have my car bugged.  My phone too probably.”

Cosima started the car and laughed.  “They won’t find us where we’re going.”  She grabbed Delphine’s phone from the dash and threw it down the storm drain before stepping on the gas and pulling out.  

“I’m not done being mad at you, but we can talk when we get there.  You look like you haven’t slept in a week. Just close your eyes for a minute and trust me.  I’ll bring you back to rule the roost before anybody gets weird, I promise.”

“Cosima- I…”  Cosima silenced her with a look and so she balled up her scarf and rested her head on the passenger window, content just to be looking over at Cosima.  Vibrant, alive, Cosima.

The next she knew, the Land Rover was stopping on a gravel road.  In the headlights she saw a low-slung cabin with boarded up windows.

“Cosima?”

“I’m Evo-Devo, remember?  We used this place for my summer field school in undergrad.  We were studying salamander populations in the vernal pools around here.  They don’t use it at all this time of year, and I think it has a fireplace.  We’re only a couple hours outside of the city if you start to get twitchy.”

They walked up to the stairs in front of the cabin, and Cosima gestured to the support beam of the porch.  “Can you reach up there?  It’s where we would hide the key so that if one of us locked someone out they could get in.”

Delphine reached up into the crook of the support and found the key easily.  She handed the key over to Cosima who opened the door.  She pointed over to the fireplace.  “Can you build a fire?  There’s wood there, and matches, and some kindling.  I’ll go see if the generator has fuel.”

Cosima walked back outside and started the generator, gratified to see that there was plenty of extra fuel in the shed supplied by the biology department.  As the generator hummed to life, a soft light shone from the windows.  She walked back in to find Delphine had started a small fire and was scavenging the cabinets.

“I found some canned foods, water, and a bottle of whiskey.  There are pillows and blankets in the cabinet”  

Cosima threw a sheet over the natty futon that was situated in front of the fire and sat down.  “I’m not hungry, but go ahead if you want.”

Delphine sat on the other side of the couch, and looked at Cosima warily.  “So, we are here.  Let’s talk.  But no more bullshit Cosima.  I know about Shay.  I know you haven’t been letting Scott do your checkups.  What else have you been hiding from me?”

“Oh, that’s really rich coming from you.  You’re obviously having me monitored. You go to Frankfurt, get recruited by Topside, and now you’re back looking more like Rachel’s clone than I do?  I’m not hiding from you Delphine, I never have.  You know me- you know me from the inside out- literally.  You have my fucking genome, and I don’t even know your middle name, if you have a family…anything!”

Delphine shrunk at Cosima’s outburst, knowing the truth of it before whispering “Cassandrè.  And I am an only child.  An orphan, really.” Her voice broke, but she continued, “My parents were killed in a skiing accident when I first began at Dyad.  I have begun to believe that Dr. Leekie had them killed at his behest- so I would find myself needing him and needing Dyad more.  Of course, I have only figured that out recently… I may be a scientist, but I am a terrible detective.”

“Oh Delphine, I’m so sorry.”  Cosima slid closer on the futon to take Delphine’s hand.  “Why don’t you just leave?  Those assholes have taken so much from you!”  

“Cosima, surely you understand that Dyad is your only hope for a cure.  You and Scott are good, but you will never have the access to the body of work that’s been done on Project Leda outside the institute.  You have to focus on finding a cure!  I can’t do it because I’m too busy making sure you and your sisters don’t get killed in other ways!”  Delphine held Cosima’s hand tightly. 

“Do you know that they almost took you from me?  Topside.  They sent a cleaner in- to kill you all.  Each of you who had become aware of Leda. If it wasn’t for Sarah…I….”  Delphine struggled for a moment before pulling her hand away and standing to pace in front of the fire.

“I feel like I am splitting apart, Cosima.  I know that you are sick, but I do not know how sick you are because you won’t take the fucking tests.  I know that Project Castor is hunting for the original genome, because they too get sick.  They don’t seem to care if they have to kill to get it, either. I know that Rachel knows more than she has let on, more than perhaps anyone knows.  But I don’t know the endgame here.  I don’t know the ultimate goal of Dyad, of Topside.  I know it has to do with the military, but that path is closed to me.”  

Her voice broke and she began to cry, “Cosima- there are too many threads for me to keep them all together.  You don’t trust me?  I don’t trust myself!  I am terrified that one of the decisions I make will be the one that ends your life forever.  And I can’t…”  She slid back to her place on the futon, defeated. “I just can’t.”

Cosima leaned back and considered Delphine. “I never asked this of you.  I never wanted it for you.  I wanted you to be the hot French exchange student with the brilliant mind and amazing hair who made my knees buckle.”  She was gratified at the small smile that played on Delphine’s lips at that.  How long had it been since she’d seen it?

“But all along I knew, I knew you were my monitor, I knew you were working for Leekie.  I knew that Dyad wanted to bring me back to the fold and you were just the shepherd to do it.  But I couldn’t stop.”

Now it was Cosima’s turn to stand.  She grabbed the bottle of whiskey and took a swig before handing it over to Delphine.  “And you’ve lied to me.  I can’t even keep track of what the truth is, Delphine.  The truth about me, about Dyad, about Castor, about my sisters.  And when I look at you, I can hardly see you!  It’s like YOU have a clone for fuck’s sake.  You’re all hard-ass business bitch and I’m left questioning everything, like a good scientist.  Testing hypothesis and coming up with conclusions.”

Delphine looked up at that, “Oh, I am all too aware of your experiments” and took a long swallow from the bottle.  Bitterly, she spat, “and tell me, is she better than me? More practiced perhaps?”

Cosima’s head whipped around at that.  She crossed the floor to find Delphine had stood, challenging her.  The smaller woman leaned into her personal space.  “It isn’t about that!  It’s about knowing the person I’m with is exactly who they say they are! It’s about forgetting that my body is a fucking science experiment and is eating itself alive! It’s about wanting you, but not having you and not being able to do a goddamned thing about it!”

At that Delphine’s hand shot out to tangle in Cosima’s hair, pulling her in and crashing their mouths together.  Cosima resisted for a moment, before clinging to Delphine’s shoulders with a small sob.  Delphine tightened her grip on the back of Cosima’s head, angling her mouth over her slight lover’s lips to kiss her more deeply, gratified when Cosima’s hips canted into her own, when the grip on her shoulders tightened almost painfully.  She maneuvered them back toward the futon, and when Cosima’s knees hit the edge she sat, with Delphine straddling her.

Cosima pulled Delphine’s hips tight against her and slid her mouth down her neck, breathing in the familiar scent of her lover.  Quickly they divested themselves of their clothes before falling back on the sheet.  Delphine pressed small hungry kisses against the column of Cosima’s throat, sliding her thigh into the space between Cosima’s legs.  She hissed at the heat she found there, rocking her hips into Cosima’s.  Bowing her head, she slid her tongue out to taste her lover’s breasts, gently biting at her nipples before suckling.  When she heard Cosima breathe “please” she insinuated her hand between their bodies, finding her lover wet and ready for her.  She held herself up on her elbow, meeting Cosima’s eyes and she slid into her.  She rocked against Cosima, feeling the tension in her lover’s body build, and feeling it echoed in her own until they shattered against one another.

Pulling the sheet over their bodies, Delphine cradled Cosima in her arms, kissing her temple, whispering endearments in French.  It was then they slept.

Morning came all too quickly, and they woke, cold, wrapped in one another’s arms.  Cosima stood to stir the embers, hoping to get a bit more heat.  She looked over at the still sleepy form of her lover.  Her hair had begun to curl overnight, and she looked like the woman she had fallen in love with again.

Cosima sat at the edge of the bed and gently shook her shoulder, a lump in her throat as she watched her come awake and become aware of her surroundings. Before she could speak, Cosima put a finger to her lips.

“I know, I know we have to go, and you have to get back to Dyad and whatever.  I know.  But I don’t feel like we’re done.  Not done talking, and not done… with each other.  I know they’re watching us, and I know you’re scared, but maybe we could try to escape again and just be us- be Cosima and Delphine instead of 324B21 and Dr. Cormier.”

Delphine nodded, her throat feeling too thick for words.  They dressed silently.  Delphine put the key back into its hiding place, and turned to see Cosima regarding her. She pulled her into tight embrace.  “I don’t know how to do this Cosima, but I want to try.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic in this fandom- I hope I did them justice.
> 
> Find me at http://fangirllikewhoa.tumblr.com


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